Quincy teen, dad find neighbor, 103, shivering, without power

An alert Quincy teenager initiated the frantic rescue of his 103-year-old neighbor during the height of this past weekend's blizzard and power failures. Dylan Hughes was shoveling snow with his father, Joseph Pereira, outside their Penn's Hill home Saturday morning when the 16-year-old thought to check on his neighbor. The city lost electricity Friday night.

The first thing Dylan Hughes noticed was his 103-year-old neighbor’s hand, trembling on the door knob as he delivered hot water and food to her during the weekend blizzard.

Their neighborhood had been without electricity – and heat – for hours on Saturday and the 16-year-old’s neighbor was shivering and appeared hypothermic.

“She had a sweatshirt, a jacket, a sweater and a shirt underneath that, and she was still shivering,” Hughes said. “I was concerned for her.”

So he and his father did something about it. They got a neighbor to call for help and then began shoveling a path through thigh-high snow so that paramedics could get the elderly woman out of her freezing house and to a hospital.

“It was like running a marathon, or running a 100-yard dash,” said Hughes’ father, Joseph Pereira. “I was out of breath, sweating from head to foot.”

Still, ambulances couldn’t get up the street on Penn’s Hill. Paramedics used what path Hughes and his father managed to clear to carry the woman from her home to an ambulance. She was taken to Quincy Medical Center and treated and is recuperating at home today. The Patriot Ledger is not identifying the woman because of her age and circumstance.

“There was a lot of adrenaline going through me, a lot,” said Hughes, a junior at Thayer Academy in Braintree. “I was afraid that the EMTs couldn’t get to her.”

Pereira estimated the woman, well known and beloved as a neighborhood fixture, was without power or heat for 16 hours before his son discovered she was in trouble.

“I was really afraid that we were going to lose her,” Pereira said. “When I saw her, she was pale as a ghost, shivering like crazy, like someone who had just come out of a blizzard.”

Pereira said his son has always paid mind to the woman.

“We’ve always really wondered how she’s living through heat and how she’s living through occasions of distress,” he said. “She’s so independent; she’s so private, (but) she needs a lot of help. We’ve sort of developed this care-giving type of relationship.”

“I don’t have any grandparents, really, and she’s been my makeshift grandmother,” Hughes said. “She definitely holds a place in my heart.”